Yesterday, the thriller game "Three Volts" developed by Shiying Studios was launched on the Steam Store and released a demo that contained the prologue and the first chapter of the game.
Due to the success of Shiying Studio's previous work "Fireworks" last year, "Three Volts" has triggered speculation and research among players with a unique "Qigong fever" story background since the project was announced. Although the demo released yesterday is only a few tens of minutes, it has attracted a lot of attention on many social media platforms, and even once rushed to the Weibo hot search.
Recently, Superpixel interviewed the game's developer, Moonlight Cockroach, and talked to him about what Shiying Studios thought and expected of "Three Volts" after the success of "Fireworks", and we were authorized to reprint and translate this part of the content.
The following is the text of the interview:
Superpixel: First of all, we've already completed the demo of Three Volts, and everyone is starting to get a little addicted to this story! But we also directly feel that "Three Volts" and "Fireworks" have a lot of differences in plot and vision. What is the reason for this discrepancy?
Moonlight Cockroach: After doing the fireworks, I felt like the next game wanted to try something new. In recent years, there have been many games with traditional Chinese folklore themes, so I thought that Sanfu could take a completely different route. Then I started to explore some of the more recent genres that were closer to urban weirdness, creepypasta (horror pasta), and weirdcore.
The story of "Fireworks" takes place in the countryside and is a closed and local story. But the story of "Three Volts" takes place in a big city. This shift in context also brings about a fundamental shift in subject matter: "Fireworks" focuses on rural families, which are often traditional and closed. Kobayashi (Ritsuru Hayashi), played by the player, can only be a bystander, and he does not interact with the people in that story in too much depth. But "Three Volts" will be more inclined to tell the story of an era. It focuses on the relationships and interactions between characters in a special era context. So this time Three Volts will give players more interactive mechanics. I think this should also be an important reason for the difference that can be felt by playing demos.
The interactive elements in "Three Volts" have increased
This time in Sanfu as a suspense story, it also uses some relatively international details. For example, the use of weird bunny dolls or mannequins to set off the atmosphere of suspense. This kind of element is actually used internationally, and urban legends such as killing rabbits or moving dolls have been circulating in Europe and the United States, which is quite different from the thick Chinese family style of fireworks.
Rabbits and dolls are the more important symbols in this game
Superpixel: The background of "Three Volts" is really very curious. This story is set in the late 1990s, and the residual temperature of Qigong fever still infects the whole society. The game revolves around the three-eyed prodigy with special features and the "planning company" behind the prodigy. Why did you choose this history, which has been faded into obscurity, as the incision of the story?
Moonlight Cockroach: Actually, in the beginning, I wanted to tell a story about family education and training. Over the years, I've also seen news about it, such as the quantum fluctuation velocity training in previous years, and the very controversial "hard-boiled egg refutation paper" last year. I was surprised that it was 2021 and that there were still people who believed in these things.
Later, I thought that these things were actually variations of qigong fever in that year, so I thought of studying qigong fever as an incision. Later, I thought about the 1990s, hong Kong films often added special function settings, such as Stephen Chow's "Gamble Saint". Therefore, in the end, the boom in qigong and special functions was also used as the background of the game.
In the 1980s, the old people practiced qigong at the Temple of Heaven
Superpixel: Recently, there have been a lot of indie games set in the 1990s, such as "Perfect Day", "Maggie Sun" series, and so on. But we noticed that many players are post-90s or even post-zero, and they don't actually experience the era in the game. We're curious how you designed the details of Three Volts so that young players can resonate with them too.
Moonlight Cockroach: I was a post-90s generation myself, so I mainly experienced that era by reading historical materials. I also refer to a lot of video works to feel the atmosphere at that time.
In fact, I will also add some fictional components to the timeline of the story. For example, the peak of qigong fever was in the 1980s, and the craze had subsided somewhat in the early 1990s, but I set the story in the late 1990s. I think such an adaptation can serve the plot. I will also emphasize the details of the setting in the game, adding some era props that young people can also resonate with, such as video recorders, pagers, projection halls and so on. Through the accumulation of details to create a feeling of nostalgia.
The game's VCD home theater is a lot of childhood memories of the post-90s
Some players who followed my Weibo also gave me support. When I first announced the background of the Sanfu story, a player sent me an article predicting the plot of "Sanfu", focusing on the historical data of Qigong fever. I was thinking it was more detailed than I had done! So I also did more in-depth research on the help they gave me.
Superpixel: The visual style of "Three Volts" is really special, can you talk about some of your inspirations? Some of the weird little animations in it remind us of childhood shadows like "Crazy Rabbit".
Moonlight Cockroach: Yes, one of the inspirations for this art design was the crazy rabbit. I also refer to a lot of videos from the 1980s and 1990s, one of which is the countdown video of the Spring Festival Gala in 1986. Everyone now feels very shady when watching these videos, but in fact, these videos are quite normal in the context of that era, just because of the accumulation of time, coupled with the loss of quality in the process of transmission, and finally presented to modern audiences a very eerie feeling.
This time, everyone playing demo may intuitively feel that the whole game has a green, moist hue, just to present this low-definition "electronic paste" feeling. In fact, this green color was often used in the art of early Hong Kong suspense films.
"Three Volts" has a strong sense of cinematic lens in the art, and with "electronic pulp" to make the scene more retro
I also added a lot of posters and slogan elements to the game to highlight the characteristics of the nineties. I've also been doing poster research for a long time. In this demo, whether it is UI or posters or fonts, they are all purely hand-drawn by me, trying to restore the atmosphere of that year. Therefore, as far as the amount of art in "Three Volts" is concerned, it is actually far more than fireworks.
Hand-painted 1990s poster
Finally, the story of "Three Volts" is based on Chongqing. When I went to Chongqing to collect wind before, it was June, often cloudy, and the whole city was like a dark green filter.
Superpixel: Fireworks and Three Volts are both stories set in Chongqing, so why do you think Chongqing is suitable for telling your story?
Moonlight Cockroach: I first learned about Chongqing on the Internet, and I felt that the layering of Chongqing was very suitable for some works with magical and suspenseful colors. In recent years, there have also been many films of this kind of theme filmed in Chongqing. Later, when I went to the field to collect wind, I found that there was a strong sense of conflict between the buildings in Chongqing. I am a northerner, and the buildings in the northern cities are not so compact, and it is not easy to appreciate the sense of anachronism between the reinforced concrete high-rise buildings and the residential buildings with peeled walls.
Another thing in Chongqing that makes me feel very special is that temples and Taoist temples often appear between the cracks of the city, deepening the division between tradition and modernity in the city, which I think is particularly wonderful. So I also added some religious elements to "Three Volts".
Superpixel: This time in the demo we saw the affectionate "talk about science, break superstition" slogan, and also saw that the protagonists of this time also have a certain psychic and metaphysical ability. There have been players who have constantly criticized such a setting, what do you think of this kind of comment? Does this protagonist setting go against the core point of the story?
Moonlight Cockroach: Actually, I think it's a misconception about the game from my gamers. In fact, we don't want to make games to educate people that we should "talk about science", but to say that we want everyone to experience a story. Maybe there is a tragic ending in this story that embodies superstition, or there are some human good and evil, but these are for the players to interpret for themselves. It's the game's responsibility to tell the story well and design different elements to serve the "storytelling" thing.
I believe that every detail in the scene has a driving effect on the plot. The slogan "Talk about science, break superstition" is used to show the conflict of ideas between roles in this era. There is a similar scene in the demo of "Three Volts" this time. On the top of an electronic fortune teller, we designed a lot of posters of "rejuvenating the country through science and education" and "promoting science", but at the bottom is a "scientific fortune teller". In fact, this is a very big conflict, with a thick black humor: let's wrap up superstition, isn't it science? I want to emphasize this ironic contrast, but I also don't want to use these few slogans to tell players what kind of person you should be.
However, I also understand that this misunderstanding may not be eliminated for the time being, so I also hope to tell the story better so that people can better experience the story, rather than asking everyone to jump out and think about what the game wants to convey.
Superpixel: From Hesse-cho tan to Sanvolt, we see that "traveling through time with objects from different eras" in your game is the core exploration tool for players. Why did you come up with such a setting?
Moonlight Cockroach: Like I mentioned before, this time "Three Volts" wants to talk about group portraits in an era. If you want to make this group image clear, players need to span many different time points. How to cross these times requires a more clever setting. If you just write a year, two years, or several years like a biography, then the game becomes a running account. So I used the mechanism of the two-protagonist time jump, on the one hand, it can increase the fun of some exploration, and on the other hand, it can show the time span of the story more intuitively.
Superpixel: Fireworks is in a sense out of the loop. What do you think of this state of explosion? Do you feel that "Three Volts" faces greater challenges?
Moonlight Cockroach: Very stressful. Although it is very happy to be recognized by the majority of players, it is also accompanied by greater expectations and higher requirements. So after a short period of happiness, stress ensues. At the end of last year, when "Three Volts" reached its early stages of development, I completely abandoned the concept of "Chinese horror" and completely focused the story on suspense. This choice also brought me a lot of uneasiness and pressure.
Because a lot of players started Fireworks because they thought it was a "Chinese horror" game, but now that I've abandoned "Chinese horror" and started creating new genres, I'm worried about whether people won't play my game anymore. I will be afraid that this theme is not mature enough, and I am worried that everyone will start to say that "Moonlight Cockroach Jiang Lang can't make a horror game", there will really be such a pressure.
Superpixel: You also highlighted on Weibo that "Three Volts" is a Chinese suspense thriller crime genre, not a Chinese horror genre. From your perspective, what is the difference between the two? How do you define these two different game categories?
Moonlight Cockroach: First of all, I think the focus of the difference is still between horror and suspense. Horror contains more sensory experiences, through the use of lighting, special effects, and lenses, so that players feel a kind of fear from the heart, while terror can contain more strange and chaotic things, involving some fantasies that do not exist in reality. But suspense is more focused on the creation of the script.
It can guide the player step by step into the story by constantly weaving questions and pitfalls through the story. Suspenseful stories also design more real-life phenomena, such as crime. From these perspectives, I think horror and suspense are actually two opposing categories: horror games hinder the player by expressing fear, leaving the player to stop in the story from time to time. Suspense games, on the other hand, lure players through traps in the story, allowing players to step into a deeper plot.
Superpixel: How do you define the "Chinese" part? Many games on the market are defined as Chinese horror, and sometimes they just put one or two small paper people in the game.
Moonlight Cockroach: I think the core of "Chinese" is a localized story. The behavior logic of the characters in the story, their line performance, and their family relationships should make people feel at a glance that this is a story that takes place in the middle Chinese. On this basis, we should consider packaging some elements of horror or suspense.
In fact, China's family relations and clan relations have been a long-standing proposition. Not only games, but also many other types of Chinese literary and artistic works will focus on the logic of the individual by taking the family and society as the large unit. The tension of the story is formed by narrating the different choices these characters make under the pressure of the large unit. The recently popular "Metamorphosis of Youth" is also exaggerated as very "grounded" by depicting the Chinese family view, although this is a Disney cartoon.
After the English version of "Fireworks" was launched, I received feedback from an overseas player, who left a message saying that "FangFang should go to the police". I think this highlights the locality of the fireworks story: under the conservative family concept in rural China, family members are more inclined to maintain internal relations than to call the police or ask for help at the first time.
I think there was a game last year that wrote a particularly "local" story, and I've talked to a lot of people about Amway called Bad Boy. It is actually a pixel game, so it is impossible to show any Chinese elements at the artistic level, but the attitude of parents to their children in this game, and the rebellious and naughty children themselves, can especially resonate with me. The only regret is that the game is too short. I heard that developers are also going to make new games, and I am especially looking forward to more Chinese works in the future that can tell local stories well.
Superipixel: Actually, under the label of "Chinese narrative", in your work, I see a lot of discussion about the power of women. "Hesse-cho Akitan" is almost a story without male characters, and the whole story of "Fireworks" revolves around the attempts and sacrifices of women trying to get out of life's predicament. Do you usually take the initiative to observe some women's issues? How were these multifaceted female figures created?
Moonlight Cockroach: I'm actually not the one who actively observes gender issues. But now there are so many women's issues that even if I don't take the initiative to understand, I can often see discussions about women's issues on Weibo. These are all unavoidable social events, so they do give me a lot of inspiration. For example, Teacher Chen in "Fireworks", she is a female figure who firmly believes that knowledge can adapt the fate, she sees the rural children's desire for knowledge, so she finally chooses to stay in Qingtan Town to support teaching. In reality, there are such great and powerful female teachers, such as Zhang Guimei. Xiao Juan in "Fireworks", she is a character who is bound and kidnapped by marriage, and there are many such women in reality, and their encounters have gradually been exposed through Weibo in recent years. The attributes of these characters are written by observing people and events in the real world.
Superpixel: For some time now, Chinese-style horror seems to have become the "traffic code" of Chinese indie games, and even various works are seen as the result of mutual "borrowing".
Moonlight Cockroach: First of all, I don't think you can talk about Chinese horror in the medium of games. In fact, this is a system that has been developed for nearly three or four decades. Hu Jinquan had already integrated "Liaozhai Zhiyi" into "Chivalrous Girl" in 71 years and began to explore Chinese horror movies. In the 1980s, "Mr. Zombie" set off a boom in zombie films, and in the early 1990s alone, the entire market produced more than 100 zombie films. The mainland's enthusiasm for such horrors and strange talk is also evident in the Internet. Until today's Internet search for horror stories, there will still be discussions about the "Top Ten Weird Posts at The End of the World" and the Douban Spirit Group.
"Chivalrous Girl"
Mr. Zombie
I think that whether it is the zombie movies of the time, the Tianya hot posts, or the current Chinese horror games, they are actually just a carrier. Their existence is closely related to the needs of the market. It shows that the public has long had a huge demand for horror and strange talk. And this demand will undoubtedly spawn huge traffic, giving people a "traffic password" perception.
Looking back at the development of Independent Games in China in recent years, in fact, not only chinese horror themes, but also many new works have emerged in other game categories such as meat pigeons and shooting, and even more than Chinese horror games. So I think that some game categories are misunderstood as "traffic passwords" is the inevitable result of the development of the industry, and it is the needs of players in the market that have spawned these works, not because one or two games are particularly hot in turn to define market demand.
Of course, I also hope that you can see more Chinese local theme works to get rid of the label of "traffic password" with strength, so that everyone can believe that local creators have the ability to tell good stories. This time, I also hope to challenge myself to tell a new story, so that everyone knows that even if you get rid of the Chinese horror label, Chinese creators can still control local stories. Give everyone a reassuring pill.
Superpixel: Finally, can you share with you your favorite games or movies and TV works?
Moonlight Cockroach: Recently busy with "Three Volts", so I didn't play a lot of games, mainly with everyone Amway "Bad Kids". In terms of film and television works, I still like suspense films with more in-depth plot portrayal, such as "Blood In Search of Plums", "Blood Guanyin" and "Big Buddha Plus" in previous years.
Personally, I think this kind of more "social" story will inspire me. In fact, in "Three Volts", there is a scene of interaction with a mouse. I also hope to tell a plot similar to a company layoff through a metaphorical approach with a movie feel, where the boss pretends to be kind behind his back and gives the dirty work to the people below, but in fact, the boss controls the life and death of these rats.
*This article was originally published in the game media Superpixel, and is translated by the travel research agency.